Reflections on Teaching Genocide
For the last five years, I have taught ‘Genocide and Human Behaviour’, a semester length elective at a high school in suburban New Jersey. Students learn the United Nations’ definition of genocide, the ‘10 Stages of Genocide’ as defined by the NGO GenocideWatch, and detailed histories of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the Rwandan genocide. After every semester I reflect on each lesson, in an endless effort to perfect the course. I have twice rewritten the curriculum for the district’s board of education, creating new units with new assignments, lectures, assessments, resources, questions and objectives. I have also taken several busloads of students down to Washington DC to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. All the while, I wonder what the utility of all of this is. Did you know that in 1915 starving Armenians sifted through horse feces to try to find undigested corns to fend off starvatio...